I propose to stay in nineteenth-century France for this chapter and move on from fashion as written to its role in the formation of a new market for contemporary art. Fashion is abstracted again as a concept that goes beyond clothes and accessories, while the materialist method I am employing throughout this book continues to anchor the argument within the economic and social aspects of cultural production. For the present chapter this means discussing the history of the nascent gallery scene in Paris after 1860 as structurally congruent with an emergent fashion system. The setting for this congruency is the laissez-faire capitalism in France in the latter half of the nineteenth century, after Louis Napoléon III had staged a coup d’état and installed the Second Empire, recasting the reign of his uncle in the context of advanced industrialisation and the free market.

In terms of method this means applying fashion studies to the historical research on the economic and cultural setting of Paris in the latter part of the nineteenth century. What does this imply for situating the discussion within, or indeed in contrast to, existing discourses on art and fashion? Materialist art history has a long tradition that begins with Hegel's books on aesthetics, and was politicised in historical-materialist writing towards the end of the nineteenth century, for instance in the work of Georgi Plekhanov. Subsequently, it experienced structural investigation in Soviet Productivism and (linguistic) formalism at the beginning of the twentieth century – as touched upon in Chapter 3 – and then returned to a self-consciously ‘Marxist’ art and cultural history through writers such as Max Raphael, Walter Benjamin and György Lucasz. The select writings on aesthetics by the Frankfurt School, who debated classical music and modern painting but also touched on the popular culture of, for example, magazines and films, were related to these endeavours. Their materialist take on cultural production and the culture industry has to be seen in the context of a left-Hegelian tradition that regards artistic and wider cultural expressions across history as concretely manifesting socio-political power structures and economic systems. Since the greater part of materialist art history up to the mid-1950s dealt with elevated, bourgeois culture, this economic system was assumed to be capitalist and its critique therefore continued to see artistic production as either confirmation of or a social challenge to an existing, implicitly exploitative and alienating political system.